“You're back now,”
Fiona hears Raven's words, calm and reassuring, “Just take a few
moments to get used to it.”
Her hands are gripped
tight in his, but she doesn't mind, it gives her an anchor, something
to hold on to, to keep her connected to this world. She sits
quietly, allowing the world to settle around her. She can hear
voices, conversation, words dipped in tension, but she can't make
sense of any of it: to her ears it's just noise.
Once her breathing has
returned to normal, she tries opening her eyes. At first it feels
like a mistake, nausea slamming in to her like a runaway bus,
throwing her whole body back into fits of retching. Nothing she sees
wont stay still, everything she looks at vibrates, echoes with
rainbow trails and ghost shapes. In front of her a wooden chair,
changing before her eyes, adopting the myriad forms of all chairs,
spectral branches reaching out from the tree it once was.
She looks at Raven,
pleading, but his eyes are elsewhere. What she sees is worse: a man
is brown overalls, a black bird the size of a horse, something
unnameable in a cowl, axe in hand, all where Raven should be.
